PEOPLE
In an opinion holding that cock-fighting is not illegal under Kansas laws prohibiting cruelty to animals. State Supreme Court Justice John Fontron managed to invoke the names of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln. The first three, Fontron said, were all devotees of cockfighting, and Lincoln at times umpired fights. Fontron attributed to Lincoln this justification of the pastime: "As long as the Almighty permitted intelligent men, created in His image and likeness, to fight in public and kill each other while the world looks on approvingly, it's not for me to deprive chickens of the same privilege."
To those who have been wondering where Miami Dolphin Coach Don Shula gets his superior qualities, he gets them from his mother. Source of this information is none other than Mrs. Shula herself. "Don takes after me in every way," she told New Orleans Saints Vice-President Harry Hulmes at that semi-famous Super Bowl party held aboard the Queen Mary. "That's right," Don's father said. "For example, he has her temper." Mrs. Shula admitted as much. "Even as a little boy," she said, "Don would get furious if he ever lost at anything. He used to be his grandmother's partner at cards. If they lost he would storm out of the house crying, crawl under the front porch and sob away."
Nixon Peacemaker, a three-year-old greyhound that had failed to win in three previous starts, won its first race minutes after the President announced the cease-fire in Vietnam. Nixon Peacemaker was an 18-to-1 long shot in an eight-dog field at Interstate Kennel Club in Byers, Colo., paying $38 to win and $149.60 in a quiniela.
Most of those mass-mailed holiday letters were Xerox vehicles for bringing friends up to date on homely minutiae like the heights and weights of children and the latest doings in the neighborhood bridge league. But not for Shirley Bridges, wife of the Shell Oil president. Hers made clear that she needs very little liberating. Here are some excerpts: "February saw us in Italy and myself skiing at Verbier, also a week at my winter-sports home away from home, Suvretta House at St. Moritz.
"April—I took one week off for helicopter-skiing in The Bugaboos, up in British Columbia.
"May 16 and 17. I was happily falling flat on my face surfing at Waikiki and shooting the breakers as No. 2 paddle of an outrigger canoe crew.
"May 20. I found Yosemite climbing difficult, requiring lay-backs on cracks, clenched handholds, etc.
"June 3 saw us at the Savoy London. Then I joined Austrian Guide-en-Famille and architect friend Jean Perrelet in Zermatt to climb the Breithorn on skis.
"July 14. Brian and self-made-up group of 18 climbers in the Peruvian Andes. You should have seen us perched on a ledge at 5,000 metres, feet in rucksacks, waiting for the moon to rise so we could see our way down the steep crevasse-pocketed gully."
There were lots more sporting notes and a crisis. On one of those trips Mrs. Bridges left a gown home in Houston. Hike back to get it? No. Sent the company jet.
That's Terry Dischinger of the Portland Trail Blazers, and Terry Dischinger's tooth—one of the three he lost in a fight with the Philadelphia 76ers. Dischinger is a dental student, but this is a way to gain experience?
When the restaurant adjacent to their hotel exploded in flames, the Ursinus College basketball team didn't hesitate. "They didn't care about themselves," Coach Warren Fry says, "they just pitched into that burning rubble and began pulling people out. Every kid in the squad went right in there." The team rescued 14 persons from the Huntington, Pa. restaurant at which they had had lunch just moments earlier, using doors and table tops as stretchers. The excitement helped to ease the memory of a defeat the night before.
Vin Scully, best known as the voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has a new daytime talk show aimed at women. It is strictly non-sports, featuring such celebrities as Walter Matthau, Phyllis Diller and Burt Bacharach. "I'm not a sports fan," explains Scully. "I'm a baseball announcer. There's a big difference. I didn't even watch the World Series."
Football coaches who look at their material and say they don't have a prayer might do well to consult the Rev. Sidney Lovett of the Union Church in Hinsdale, Ill. Asked to give the invocation at the Kodak Coaches of the Year Awards Dinner of the American Football Coaches Association, the Rev. Lovett compassionately thought also of the losers. His prayer went, in part: "Thou art a God of mercy and so we lift before Thy care those coaches who with endurance and honor—but a losing record—are grateful for a new year. Deliver them from the nightmares of instant replay and sullen alumni. And if it please Thee, bestow upon them sure-lingered ends, fleet runners and secure cartilages, and linemen of granite.... Now, Lord, Thou alone knows whether or not we are worthy of this meal, but with thanks to Kodak, and with teeth both real and false, let us take delight in it." And when was the last time you heard an invocation applauded?
TWO PHOTOS